Thomas Edsall On White Voters In The NYT: “Exterminate All the Brutes!”

Warning

Dravosburg, Pa. is a small — population 1,746 — working-class suburb that lies along the Monongahela River 10 miles southeast of Pittsburgh. If we want to understand what actually propelled Donald Trump to victory last November, presidential voting patterns there provide a vital clue.

Four years later, the men and women of Dravosburg abandoned their Democratic loyalties and backed Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton, 56.3 to 41.1.

What is so interesting about this working-class community, with its strong ties to organized labor? It is one of thousands of white enclaves across the nation that provided Trump with his margin of victory.

The election of Donald Trump revealed that in some of the nation’s whitest municipalities and counties — the communities arguably most insulated from urban crime, immigration and gangs — Trump did far better than Romney had done four years earlier.

How dare they show concern for their children?

The 2016 results suggest that residents of a diminishing number of decisively white American towns and small cities — even those which supported Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012 — can now be politically mobilized around race, ethnicity, multiculturalism and immigration.

None of the nation’s whitest municipalities and counties — especially those in the Trump-voting Midwest — is immune.

This virus of white communities who would vote for Barack Obama over Mitt Romney but Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton must be eradicated diversificated.

… Trump clearly inflamed and mobilized white voters living in these circumstances. Neither Romney nor John McCain, the previous two Republican nominees, campaigned on racially freighted issues and neither produced the same pattern of support.

Best of all, Romney and McCain lost.

When I look back at the 2016 election, what is really striking is how much influence over the course of events was exercised by the relatively small numbers of voters in super-white municipalities and counties and by the politician who ignited them — how the last gasp of a small fraction of the electorate set the nation on such a dangerous and destructive course.